On my radar ...

Polly Toynbee, challenged me to prove I could work in childcare myself. I'm afraid that betrays an inability to appreciate that childcare workers are professionals. It is high time we stopped thinking childcare is something that anyone could do.

Those European countries whose childcare is widely admired put greater trust in highly qualified staff. In England nursery staff are not allowed to look after more than four two-year-olds, but in France they can look after eight. Toynbee has sung the praises of the national level of Sweden and Denmark, yet those countries impose no ratios of nursery staff to children at all.

And here's a video of Truss introducing the proposals yesterday.

• Twitter chat on changes to disability benefits, on the Guardian this afternoon. It will discuss the changes which will see the end of Disability Living Allowance for working-age claimants, replaced by Personal Independence Payments. The chat takes place between 2pm and 3pm. Follow @Claire_Phipps or the #gdnchat hashtag to share your views and ask questions.

• An interesting piece in Public Finance by Jonathan Carr-West, director of the Local Government Information Unit. He argues that it's breathtakingly cheeky of Eric Pickles to describe local authorities as "undemocratic" where they raise tax levels by just under the 2% threshold. He writes:

Yes, we need to give local people more say over the public services they use and the way in which their taxes are spent, but that means having honest, sometimes uncomfortable, conversations with the public. But for the Secretary of State to say that what 'residents really want is cuts to taxes not bin collections' is perilously close to endorsing what Ben Page of Ipsos Mori has described as the British people's 'impossible dream' of Scandinavian welfare provision on American taxes.

• In the SPeye blog, Joe Halewood writes about the bedroom tax, arguing:

It is not just the absence of a definition of the minimum bedroom size that is irrational it is the de facto definition of need for bedrooms the bedroom tax does have that is irrational.